Professions for Women

“Professions for Women” is an abbreviated version of the Virginia Woolf delivered before a
branch of the National Society for Women’s Service on January 21, 1931; it was published
posthumously in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. On the day before the speech,
she wrote in her diary: “I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new
book – a sequel to a Room of One’s Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called
Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting!” More than a year and a half later, on
October 11, 1932, Virginia Woolf began to write her new book: “THE PARGITERS: An
Essay based upon a paper read to the London/National Society for women’s service.” “The
Pargiters” evolved into The Years and was published in 1937. The book that eventually did
become the sequel to A Room of One’s Own was Three Guineas (1938), and its first working
title was “Professions for Women.”
The essay printed here concentrates on that Victorian phantom known as the Angel
in the House (borrowed from Coventry Patmore’s poem celebrating domestic bliss) – that
selfless, sacrificial woman in the nineteenth century whose sole purpose in life was to soothe,
to flatter, and to comfort the male half of the world’s population. “Killing the Angel in the
House,” wrote [p. 276] Virginia Woolf, “was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”
That has proved to be a prophetic statement, for today, not only in the domain of letters,
but in the entire professional world, women are still engaged in that deadly contest in their
struggle for social and economic equality.
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WHEN YOUR SECRETARY INVITED ME TO COME HERE, she told me that your Society is
concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you
something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am
employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession
is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other,
with the exception of the stage – fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road
was cut many years ago – by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane
Austen, by George Eliot – many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten,
have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came
to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and
harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No
demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough
to write all the plays of Shakespeare – if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris,
Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of
writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they
have succeeded in the other professions.
But to tell you my story – it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves
a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right
– from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and [p. 277] cheap
enough after all – to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the
corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a
journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month – a very
glorious day it was for me – by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound
ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional
woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that
instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's
bills, I went out and bought a cat – a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved
me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.
What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits?
But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was
about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I
were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the
phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine
of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and
my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and
so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation
may not have heard of her – you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I
will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely
charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She
sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat
in it – in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but
preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all – I need not
say it – she was pure.
Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty – her blushes, her great grace. In
those days – the last of Queen Victoria – every house had its Angel. And when I came to
write I encountered her with the very first words. [p. 278] The shadow of her wings fell on
my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen
in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered:
“My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by
a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never
let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as
if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though
the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of
money – shall we say five hundred pounds a year? – so that it was not necessary for me to
depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did
my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted
in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the
heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even
a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the
truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel
of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they
must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly– tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever
I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot
and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far
harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had
despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe;
it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in
roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience
that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was
part of the occupation of a woman writer. [p. 279]
But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say
that what remained was a simple and common object – a young woman in a bedroom with
an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had
only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not
know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has
expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of
the reasons why I have come here out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us
by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures
and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.
But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and
six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious.
A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car.
And it was thus that I became a novelist – for it is a very strange thing that people will give
you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing
so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous
novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a
novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to
understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am not giving
away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as
possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed
with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books,
to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing
may break the illusion in which he is living – so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the
mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very
shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and
women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me [p. 280] writing a novel in a state of
trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for
minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my
mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge
of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep
unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of
our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far
commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers.
Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where
the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was
foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was
roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To
speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the
passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would
be shocked. The consciousness of – what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth
about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write
no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be
a very common experience with women writers – they are impeded by the extreme
conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom
in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which
they condemn such freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the
adventures of my professional life. The first – killing the Angel in the House – I think I solved.
She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not
think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still
immensely powerful – and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler
than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for [p. 281] a woman rather than
for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight,
many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can
sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.
And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new
professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I
have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they
are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open – when
there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant – there
are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define
them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the
difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for
which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those
aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The
whole position, as I see it – here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first
time in history I know not how many different professions – is one of extraordinary interest
and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned
by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are
earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning – the room is
your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.
How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you
going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost
importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first
time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I
stay and discuss those questions and answers – but not to-night. My time is up; and I must
cease. [p. 282]

Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women”, The Virginia Woolf Reader.

Preface and Notes by Mitchell A. Leaska. Boston: Mariner Books, 1984. pp. 276-282.